“The voice of Accompaniments feels confident, loving, imaginative, philosophically probing; gentle and tender all at once. The compassionate vast vision that runs quietly and passionately throughout is generous—both in what it can tell directly and in what it can preserve in silence.”

The images in this book—Accompaniments—for they are images, even photographs, rendered in words — arise from the poet Mary Di Lucia’s responses to Igor Posner’s collection of photographs Past Perfect Continuous (Red Hook Editions 2017). The stories have a life of their own, beyond and within any particular space and time, beyond themselves.

In Accompaniments you will find a book of stories, a travelogue of the spirit — nostalgia for things never known and elegy for things forgotten remembered. Prospect and Retrospect. The Woman Who is Not Here and Women of Empire. A playful exploration of photography in the improbable sequence of Brief Histories of Mid-Century Portraiture, and histories of snow, of TV. You will catch glimpses of yourself here.

It doesn’t matter where you open it.

Every piece is a beginning and an end.

If you have it with you, “Truly you lack nothing.”

Accompaniments is available as stand alone or bundled with Igor Posner’s Past Perfect Continuous